On a special edition Women’s History Month episode on “Listen In With KNN,” award-winning journalist Kelsey Nelson welcomed the co-founders of Volleybird Athletic Style and Ruley the E-Referee, Cassandra Toroian and Tracy Thomas, discussing the platforms enhancing recreational sports.
Volleybird provides subscription-based sports racket lifestyle, delivering brands for pickleball, paddle, golf and tennis since January 2025.
Meanwhile, Ruley serves as an AI powered sports app providing instant answers, visual breakdowns and live rule updates for 16 sports where Toroian leads as CEO and Thomas as the creative director.
“I was happy to see games like pickleball come along and get more people in different age groups, come together,” Toroian said. … “And basically, we felt like there was a synergy between these four sports for adults.”
Toroian, a former Division I tennis player at Lafayette College and Thomas, a former marathon runner and pickleball player, grew their entrepreneur journeys from their experiences as athletes which impacted them to establish equipment and products for their site.
For Thomas, running became critical for her and began using the Couch to 5k Program.
“I was starting to have some health issues and looked for something that I could do immediately that didn’t have a high startup cost,” Thomas said. … “I printed it out on my little sheet of paper and I took it to the gym with me and that’s how I started working towards running marathons.”
When it comes to pickleball, Thomas said people tend to get a little fanatical about their gear like herself.
“I became fanatical about pickleball and was always on social media and online looking at gear,” Thomas said. … “I was always online looking at products, but everyone seemed to be selling the same things.”
Thomas said that the Volleybird site contains items in boxes created by college students and selling women owned fair trade products.
She added that she and Toroian are open to offering more sustainable products along with their renewable tennis balls and paddle balls.
According to Recycle Balls, roughly 125 million tennis balls end up in landfills each year in the United States and take 400 years to decompose.
“We’re hoping to do even more of that and lean into it, even creating some of our own apparel that are made out of recycled plastics and things,” Thomas said.
Besides Volleybird Athletic Style, the two launched the mobile app, Ruley the E-Referee in March 2024.
“We started out building this mobile app, basically for me to be able to use,” Toroian said. “As we were getting more into it and doing more research, we realized there was a prolific issue out there in sports with even really youth sports.”
A former Division I tennis player, Toroian recalled playing pickleball with Thomas, but noticed the amount of bickering occurred on the court and arguing over the rules.
“I thought, wow, as a tennis player, I’m not used to seeing this kind of thing, like it was foreign to me and so I was a little taken back by it,” Toroian said.
Since then, the app has grown and has become a helpful tool in providing answers for questions asked about a certain aspect of the game, making it situational.
“You can put in a real situation that just happened on the court, on the pickleball court,” Thomas said. … “And it gives you the answer in a conversational way.”
Toroian added that Ruley helps the sport media channel or the brand to get more stickiness instead of having text explaining and diving into the rules of a sport.
“Attract more users, get more fans and spectators and hopefully more players too because if you don’t know the rules, it can be a little intimidating to go out there,” Toroian said.
With the start up of the app, she believes that individuals can learn more about certain sports as a way to also eliminate the discourse and negativity calling it “uplifting and positive” while hoping to “help get more involved in and out there playing these sports.”
